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What would your CEO say if you proved 71% of the leads your company generates on the Internet are wasted? Who would be fired?

Entire industries exist to help web marketers increase lead conversion on their website by fractions of a percent. Training firms work weekly or monthly with entire sales forces to boost closing ratios by 10% or 20%. Businesses are scraping for incremental increases in marketing yields, close ratios, and leverage through technology, yet overlooking a gaping black hole that exists somewhere between their marketing and sales teams.

Companies don’t respond fast enough to leads.

In fact, they take 46 hours and 53 minutes to pick up the phone and respond to a lead. And the sales rep who does call, only makes 1.3 call attempts before giving up and moving on. And recent research shows it is getting better, but only slightly.

How do we know this? We have tested over 10,000 companies in fifteen different “secret shopper” studies over the last five years and these are the combined numbers from all tests. We fill in a lead on their Web site with a real phone number and email address and track how fast they respond and how many calls or emails they make.

This research has been recently published again by Steve Olenski on Forbes.com, and prior to that in Harvard Business Review and Inc.com. At last count, 12 companies have built their business models on responding immediately to leads. A new industry has sprung up called Lead Response Management.

Our own in-house research shows only 27% of leads ever get contacted. Yet with a combination of awareness, best practices, and technology; companies can contact around 92% of leads. I have seven practices I’ll share in a later article that will enable companies to achieve this target.

An increase from 27% to 92% is an increase of 341% lift in results just by responding immediately and persistently to leads.

Do CEOs know that of the massive marketing spend they have approved to generate leads only 27% of the leads actually get spoken to? And worse yet, in the same studies anywhere from 35% to 64% of the leads never got called at all?

Dave Elkington, our CEO, put it in perspective: “Imagine going to ’s on a Wednesday morning and asking to talk to a sales rep about a pair of shoes and the salesperson says they will be happy to help you Friday morning!”

The Internet is shortening our attention spans, but sales teams still have absolutely no idea how fast they need to respond to online inquiries to be effective and they don’t have the technology to help them do it. And IT and marketing departments are rarely any better, often tying up leads for hours or days just getting them routed to the right place.

Some marketing automation companies ‘score’ leads with powerful algorithms, but add hours to the process of getting it to the right place; losing far more value than they gain.